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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

BlackBerry 10 Aristo specifications leak out

Research in Motion. Expect only the *best! If this leak holds true, RIM will be back as a dominant player.

This past week readers were treated to leaks galore. Covering the spec lists on the full touch BlackBerry 10 L-Series (Laguna, Lisbon, & London) to render mock-ups on the L and N-Series, the first BlackBerry 10 keyboard phone. While the N-Series slightly disappointed, my spirits were again lifted after seeing this on my desk.

I’ve never seen the A series mentioned anywhere, so not only are we revealing the specs but the models name. At this point, I’m unable to comment on whether this will be a series or a one-off phone for those who want larger screens.

With the height and width seeing a slight bump, the spectacular specifications listed here could only mean RIM is damn serious about claiming the market it once owned.

The BlackBerry 10 Aristo (Aristo” is Greek for “the best”) I think will be the ultimate of the BlackBerry 10’s to come. Let’s go check out the specs already!

Getting technical – In depth:

Using the baseband modem is the MDM9x15 (possibly the 9615 – if so this is the same one found in the iPhone 5), which is a so-called world mode mobile data modem and according to Qualcomm’s documentation, supports “LTE FDD/TDD CAT3, SVLTE-DB, Release 8 DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, GSM/GPRS/EDGE, EGAL, 1x Adv., EV-DO Rev. A/B”.

The processor is a Qualcomm APQ8064 Krait Quad Core 1.5GHz. The APQ8064 was announced in July 2012 at Uplink, Qualcomm’s developer conference by Raj Talluri who was previously employed at Texas Instrument and was closely involved with the developments of the OMAP 3 and OMAP 4 chipsets. Classifying the APQ8064 in the S4 Pro family this chipset featuring four Krait cores running at up to 1.5 GHz when all four cores are taxed, or up to 1.7 GHz when only one core is active*!

Aristo:

136 x 68 x 8.85 mm / 5.35” x 2.59” x 0.34” in

L-Series: (Laguna, Lisbon, London)

130 x 65.6 x 9mm / 5.11” x 2.58” x 0.35” in

Display: OCTA Glass OLED 4.65″, 1280×720 – 24bit – 16:9 (L-Series: 1280×768 resolution)
Those that are unfamiliar, OCTA is a development of Samsung Mobile Display. OCTA – On-Cell Touch Active-Matrix Light-Emitting Diode (AMOLED). This display was designed and produced to help accelerate performance demands from today’s mobile devices. With On-Cell Touch this removes embedded layers on the screen giving it the competitive edge of the 8.85mm depth – the thinnest BlackBerry so far.

Another in the full touch family, this BlackBerry 10 is a Capacitive All Touch device. Interaction will be no doubt the same rich and intuitive gestures from the PlayBook to the Dev Alpha’s.

The camera repeats with 8MP. This should have seen 12MP with everything else in place. The usual suspects of 1080p/30fps are here. The front-facing camera see’s a nice 2MP update at 720p

Now it gets exciting! 2GB of RAM. This is what I want to see in all 2013 models. 16GB onboard Flash is present and includes a 16GB MicroSD card fitting in a Hot Swappable MicroSD slot. Still no mention for support of the 64GB microSD.

Wi-Fi will have the “n” inclusion with backwards compatibility of a/b/g. With a speed boast from 2.5GHz/5GHz with 4G MobileHotspot.

I said it before: connectivity, accessibility, and the sharing of information – This has not been forgotten. MicroUSB, MicroHDMI, NFC, and DLNA come treated with Bluetooth 4.0. This is a major update as so far leaked documentations indicate that the L-Series devices mentioned will see BT 2.1 which is a huge let down going forward.

Audio over-haul: Two microphones are common, but having four with Noise Reduction is just a bonus. The over-haul is the Wideband AMR. Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate uses a speech compression technique to increase the audio bandwidth to 7 kHz. This would roughly double the speech bandwidth compared to narrow-band AMR without impacting the radio and/or backhaul requirements.

Holy smokes Batman! The Aristo will be packed with a 2800mAh battery. The downside…it will be a sealed battery with a non-removable door. Given that it will be 8.85mm in thickness, this wasn’t a big surprise. However, the BlackBerry community aren’t familiar to sealed units (aside from PlayBook and Dev Alpha owners) compared to iPhone users as all previous BlackBerry’s have removable batteries. This will take getting used to for the most, but under the new architecture of QNX, I don’t believe battery pulling will be of a common practise. The PlayBook’s are a good example of this.

Among the sensors, Face detect for phone calls shows up here. I mentioned Apple’s FaceTime with a question mark in a previous post, but it sounds like the ability to answer calls by a quick scan of the face. This tech reminds me of Samsung’s face detection for unlocking access. Let’s hope RIM or it’s third-party choice if this is the case has significantly improved this functionality as this would be something heavily adopted by motorist worldwide.

SIM remains to be a mystery. I still believe the MicroSIM has been adopted for BlackBerry 10′s, although I’m really hoping it will be a NanoSIM.

The specifications left out are straight-forward and were not areas that needed to be expanded and/or explored on.

Though not being officially announced this is indeed classified as a leak. So take as you may.